Key performance indicators can provide invaluable insights to every team in a company. They help leaders and employees stay aligned on and assess progress toward goals, identify areas for improvement, and ensure everyone is held accountable for their efforts and results. Because the work of development teams is primarily outward-facing—with most of their efforts playing a large role in their co-workers’ and customers’ experiences—identifying and tracking informative KPIs is especially important.
There are many telling KPIs that can help guide a dev team, from Agile-specific measurements to those that shine a light on how well teams across an organization are working together to serve customers. Here, 20 members of Forbes Technology Council share key KPIs they believe are essential and what these metrics can tell dev teams.
1. Customer Impact And Value Delivered
Customer impact metrics and value delivered matter most. It doesn’t matter how great you are at writing and shipping code or designing solutions. If you’re not moving the needle to keep or attract customers, then none of it matters. Customers don’t buy elegant code; they buy solutions to help them with a need or a problem. – Craig Strong, AWS
2. Work In Progress
A foundational KPI that many don’t look at is work in progress. I like this metric because it highlights problems in the system. If there’s a lack of clarity, in many cases, WIP will increase. If there’s a lack of coordination among the team, WIP will increase. Ideally, a team should only have as much WIP as it has members. Identifying when that’s not the case is critical to ensure smooth delivery and diagnose problems within processes. – Bryan Smith, RiskLens Inc.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
3. Code Quality
Code quality is a critical KPI for development teams, as it predicts the long-term success of software projects. By performing code reviews and sharing feedback, dev teams can continuously enhance reliability, maintainability and adherence to coding standards, all of which leads to a higher-quality codebase. Over time, this will lead to a decrease in reported bugs. – Namrata Sengupta, Stellar Data Recovery Inc. dba BitRaser
4. Story Points Per Sprint
I’ve tried all manner of KPIs and objectives and key results, and I always return to the humble story points per sprint. Because story points are a relative measure, this can only be used to track trends over time. But the metric is so simple that it’s easy to communicate to engineers and executives alike, and it clearly demonstrates where productivity is improving. Combine it with cost per story point for executive updates. – Ed Donner, Nebula
5. Cycle Time
Cycle time is an important KPI. Measuring the duration from work item initiation to delivery, it measures efficiency, productivity and Agile implementation. A shorter cycle time indicates higher productivity, effective collaboration and streamlined processes. Monitoring cycle time boosts performance, enabling faster delivery and enhanced customer satisfaction. – Srikumar Ramanathan, Mphasis
6. First Contact Resolution
Many customer service departments track first contact resolution, and it’s a great metric to see how well the dev, product, quality assurance and DevOps teams are cooperating. Devs need to be vocal about understanding requirements to ensure projects can go to production as quickly and smoothly as possible. If the dev team has a high FCR rate, it’s a good sign that projects will progress smoothly. It’s a creative way of looking at efficiency. – Stevan Popov, Phoenix Consultancy LLC
7. Problem Roadmaps
Problem roadmaps are a critical KPI for dev teams. They help identify the top three challenges to solve before the next phase of development. Roadmaps help teams understand and define how to solve each problem, even though they may implement the solution at a later phase. It ensures a clear path to the final product and prioritizes problem-solving in the development process. – Michael Plitkins, Spatial
8. Total Cost Of Ownership
Determining the total cost of ownership for each component a team builds is often forgotten when it comes to creating scalable solutions. With minimal effort, all aspects of your product should have a cost factor built in for accurate reporting. – Jason Haworth, Apica
9. AI And Automation Implementation And ROI
As artificial intelligence and automation push forward at a rapid pace, it is extremely important for dev teams to track the implementation of and the ROI generated by leveraging automation and AI. It can also be extremely valuable to set goals for how many new tools you try each quarter and how and why those tools succeed or fail in your environment. – Kerri Davis, Fortress
10. Code Reusability
A critical KPI for development teams is code reusability, which is an important part of reducing cycle time. Reusable code decreases the time spent on repetitive tasks, enabling faster releases. High reusability ensures efficiency and agility, allowing quick adaptation to market changes and customer needs and driving competitiveness and innovation. AI can help track, trace, retrieve and assist in achieving high code reusability quite well. – Chiranjiv Roy, Course5 Intelligence
11. DORA Metrics
We use the four DevOps research and assessment metrics. First is deployment frequency, which tracks how often code changes are deployed to production. Next is lead time for changes, which is the time it takes from a code change to move from concept to production. Third is mean time to recover, which measures the time taken to restore services or recover from incidents. Finally, we track our change failure rate, which is the proportion of code changes that result in service disruptions or require rollbacks. – Mia Millette, Skyline Technology Solutions
12. Dev To QA Churn Rate
The dev to quality assurance churn rate is defined as the percentage of tickets that are sent back to the dev team by QA. Typically, a high rate indicates that specifications are unclear or that the quality of our dev team’s work was poor. A week-over-week increase in the dev to QA churn rate is a leading indicator that our software development life cycle needs attending to. – Anthony Brooke, DrFirst, Inc.
13. Revenue Per Employee
Everything else is secondary to revenue per employee. It’s a great KPI for prioritizing competing projects. Calculating revenue per employee is easier if a dev project is customer-facing and/or revenue-generating. Harder, but more critical, is calculating dev project revenue for internal and support projects. But it is critical—it focuses everyone on why we are all here, helps weed out “pet” projects and keeps down scope creep. – Rhonda Dibachi, HeyScottie.com
14. Team Velocity
Team velocity is an important KPI to keep an eye on for a dev team. It helps you with not only progress tracking, but also with capacity planning. It enhances outcome prediction and facilitates continuous improvements. – Srikar Chinam, KarmaSuite
15. Code Cleanliness
It’s essential to track code cleanliness. “Dirty” coding practices lead to more than just increased maintenance work. They also lead to more rework and potential security risks, which can jeopardize your entire business. – Nikhil Sojitra, Aloola LLC
16. Flow Metrics
Flow metrics offer valuable insight into a development team’s performance and efficiency. They reveal bottlenecks, depict work distribution and highlight the rate of work completion. Flow metrics encourage continual improvement by aiding teams in optimizing process efficiency and resource allocation and identifying areas that need improvement, leading to enhanced productivity and product quality. – Daniel Knauf, Material+
17. ‘Waste Code’
When you talk to highly ranked engineers at the top product companies in Silicon Valley, the theme that comes across most often is how much of their time is wasted on new exciting features that never see the light of the day or on refactorings that are aborted midflight. Let’s call it “waste code.” Keeping an eye on this KPI, formally defined as code in production one year post-release, is essential, as it involves a lot of money. – Sergei Rodionov, Axibase Corporation
18. Service Uptime
Service uptime is an essential KPI that every dev team should focus on to improve the customer experience. Specifically, velocity (the speed of the development of a required feature or the squashing of a bug), deployment frequency (the mean time to recovery), and defect density (the mean time between failures) are factors to prioritize to ensure all applications stay within the industry range of acceptable downtime. – Ravi Mayuram, Couchbase
19. Mean Time To Repair
One important KPI that helps align security and dev teams is the mean time to repair discovered defects. An engineering team’s ability to repair bugs, patch security vulnerabilities and respond to incidents quickly and positively affects users’ perception of product quality and keeps maintenance costs low. Measuring this KPI promotes both product quality and security. – Varun Badhwar, Endor Labs
20. Percentage Of Milestones Or Dates Missed
While I support mainstream KPIs to help measure DevOps’ performance, measuring the percentage of key milestones or dates missed will help focus the team on delivering products on time and on budget. The percentage of dates missed is a good leading indicator for the quality of the work to be completed and can arguably help improve quality metrics and reduce the number of defects. – Charles Bankston, NiSource, Inc.
Read the full article here
